Marketers see gold mine in gay travel
By Edward Iwata
USA Today
SAN FRANCISCO — During what some gays jokingly call "the dark ages" a decade or two ago, companies shunned the gay market out of ignorance or fear of backlash. Many cities and convention-and-visitors bureaus overlooked gay travelers. Marketing people lacked hard data to target gay consumers nationwide.
Today, the market for gay and lesbian consumers is highly coveted and hitting the mainstream in a huge way, consultants, marketing professionals and executives say.
The 16 million gay consumers age 18 and older in the United States boast $641 billion in buying power, or cash to spend after taxes, reports Witeck-Combs Communications and Harris Interactive.
And corporations and local governments know it.
Last year, 175 Fortune 500 companies — airlines, automakers, financial firms, retailers and others — actively courted the gay dollar through advertising, compared with 19 in 1994, reports the 2005 Gay Press Report by the Prime Access advertising firm and Rivendell Media Co.
What's more, dozens of cities that didn't cater to gay travelers decades ago — including Miami, Dallas, Philadelphia, Phoenix and Bloomington, Ind. — are wooing gays to their hotels, restaurants and nightclubs.
Why now?
"We're at a tipping point, with gays coming out in society and business," says Andrew Freeman of Andrew Freeman & Co., a hospitality and restaurant consultancy in San Francisco. "All of a sudden, we've become a great market for all industries to go after."
The gay market is drawing attention from:
Now, dozens of cities and convention bureaus are going all out to lure gay visitors, from spending millions on advertising to showcasing gay events.
Frances Stevens, founder and publisher of lesbian magazine Curve, jokes that the new ads are much classier than the old ones, which featured brawny, hairy men toting beers.
Companies that cater to gays and lesbians still risk a backlash from fundamentalist religious groups, which have called for boycotts of companies that market to gays, donate to gay nonprofits or portray gays as "normal" families in ads.
Despite the potential for controversy, a recent survey by Opinion Research and Fleishman-Hilliard found that 68 percent of Americans would still buy from companies that marketed to gays.
